The Oral Health and Systemic Disease Research Group has available standard equipments required for routine use in a contemporary laboratory, including modern molecular biology facilities, -800C freezers, -20oC freezers, refrigerators, laminar flow hoods, liquid nitrogen storage tanks, IBM/AT-based image analysis systems, ultracentrifuges, histology facilities, spectrophotometers, scintillation counters, multilabel microplate readers, Abicore sequencer, laser dissection microscope, etc.

The Oral Health and Systemic Disease research facility also houses a number of specialized equipment that are available for use by other investigators through collaborative research or by arrangement.

Such equipment includes:

• Luminex 100 Multiplex Bio-Assay Analyzer
• ScanArray 4000 Microarray analysis system slide reader
• Genetic Microsystems 417 arrayer
• Bedfont Scientific PiCO system
• Confocal microscopy suite (Olympus FV500)
• Coy Anaerobic Chambers
• BD FACSCalibur
• AKTA FPLC (Amersham Biosciences)
• qPCR
• Spectrum One FTIR Spectrometer (Perkin-Elmer: capable of data collection over a wavenumber range of 370-7800 cm-1)
• Near Infrared Spectrometer (Control Development Inc; 900-1700 nm)

The Periodontics Clinic is situated adjacent to the Oral Health and Systemic Disease Research Group. The clinic receives over 1,000 patients/year and meets the requirements of our research group for clinical samples and is a partner in translational research.

The University of Louisville is the education and research partner of the Louisville Medical Center, which includes a nationally recognized University Hospital and two leading private health care systems – Jewish Hospital and Norton Healthcare. The School of Dentistry is joined by the School of Medicine, James Brown Cancer Center, Kentucky Lions Eye Center, Kosair Children’s Hospital, the Institute for Public Health, and other initiatives to form the University’s Health Science Center in downtown Louisville.

Over 12 university centers provide a wealth of intellectual stimulation and access to unlimited technical expertise in contemporary cell and molecular biology, including:

• Birth Defects Center (R. M. Greene, director)
• Center for Genetics and Molecular Medicine (K. S. Ramos, director)
• Nucleic Acids and Microarray Core (W. Zacharias, director)
• DNA Core (R. Gregg, director)
• Proteomics Core (J. Klein, director)
• Biomolecular Mass Spectrometry Core (W. Pierce, director)
• Bioinformatics Core (E. Rouchka, director)
• Transgenics Core (Paul Epstein, director)